Two men in various states of undress soaked up the sun on the plaza at Castro and Market streets.
San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris

A city supervisor here proposed a law Tuesday that would ban nudity in most public places across the city. For years, the city has held an "equilibrium" with nudity at public events and occasionally in neighborhoods, said the supervisor, Scott Wiener, but the nudity recently "has just gotten extreme."

At issue is a public plaza that regularly attracts nudists in the historically gay Castro neighborhood, prompting a debate about the limits of civil liberties in this famously tolerant city. After complaints about the naked people by some businesses and residents, Mr. Wiener proposed the bareness-busting bill.

The proposed ban doesn't sit well with some urban nudists.

"This is, in my opinion, an attack on freedom," said George Davis, 66 years old, who was soaking up the sun Tuesday wearing nothing more than sunglasses and a hat, reading a book about Twitter, the microblogging service. As one of the Castro's famous nudists, "I meet people from all over the world," he said, including South Korea, France and Liechtenstein.

Some argued a ban would mark a slippery slope for the city. "Today it is naked people, and next week it will be drag queens, and then the week after that it will be people who wear leather," said Mitch Hightower, 51, who organizes an annual "nude-in" body freedom demonstration in the city and runs an exhibitionist website.

"I think there are a lot of people in the community that feel in order to advance legal and civil rights they need to blend in and be as bland and vanilla as possible," he said.

Increasingly over the past year, a group of three to more than a dozen men have formed what Mr. Wiener calls an "ad hoc nudist colony" on most afternoons in the Castro's main public plaza, just steps away from a train station and the city's jumbo rainbow gay pride flag.

"If only they looked better, it would be great," said Tom Moore, bartender at the Twin Peaks bar in front of the Castro plaza, which doesn't let the naked people inside.

But that doesn't keep some tourists away, he said. "The foreign tourists love to have their pictures taken with them," said Mr. Moore.

The photo shoots bother Mr. Wiener. "Our neighborhood is not a zoo," he said.

Cleve Jones, a gay rights activist and longtime Castro resident, said there should be a limit to San Francisco's tolerance. "I am not a prude," he said. "I don't believe this behavior would be tolerated by the police if they were doing it in Dianne Feinstein's or Nancy Pelosi's neighborhood."

Josh Moreno, manager at the Hot Cookie shop on Castro Street, said he had no problem with the naked guys, including in his cookie store. "We don't discriminate against people based on their appearance," he said. "We shouldn't be focusing our taxpayer dollars to ban something that is just natural."

California law bans "lewd" behavior, which some Castro residents accused the nudists of, and other cities including Berkeley and San Jose have over the years added specific ordinances outlawing nudity.

ENLARGE

San Francisco already bans nudity in its public parks and last year passed a law backed by Mr. Wiener that requires nudists to cover chairs and benches in public places before sitting on them.

The state of New York's penal code bans nudity, with exceptions for breast-feeding and participation in a theatrical production, though enforcement of the law is left up to local police.

In a nod toward compromise, Mr. Wiener's proposal would prohibit nudity in city plazas, sidewalks and public transit, but not at festivals and parades like the annual Folsom Street Fair and crosstown Bay to Breakers race, which attract naked participants from far and wide.

Most of the people who have complained to him about the nudity are gay residents of the Castro, said Mr. Wiener. "This is not what we fought for," he said.

Lately, some in San Francisco have been worrying about this city banning too many things. In 2004, for instance, the board of supervisors voted to ban the city's zoo from keeping elephants in enclosures smaller than 15 acres, a move that effectively banned elephants in the city. A 2009 law made composting food waste mandatory, banning residents from throwing out dinner scraps. A year later, the city prohibited restaurants from handing out free toys along with meals that didn't meet certain nutrition standards.

Harmeet Dhillon, the chairwoman of the San Francisco Republican Party, said San Francisco bans too much, and she opposed some city bans, including one on plastic bags that went into effect this week. "These are all unwarranted extensions of government," she said.

But she sides with Mr. Wiener on the nudity ban. "I just saw one outside of the Transamerica building. He was wearing shoes and socks and a backpack," she said. "It was kind of gross."

Mr. Hightower said that it is all in the eyes of the beholder. "There are a lot of things that I see when I walk down the public street that I would rather not look at, but I am not asking everybody to legislate that away," he said.

The debate has already taken theatrical form. On Sept. 21, a short play called "The Buck Naked Church of Truth" debuted at the local Left Coast Theater Company. The play, which includes nudity, tells the story of a father who finds his son naked in the Castro.

James A. Martin, the play's 54-year-old San Francisco author, said he got the idea to write the play because his friends were all talking about the naked guys in the Castro. "It was causing dissension among people who normally agree on things—this sounds like a good thing to explore in a short comic play," said Mr. Martin.

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